The Short Stories of S. Rajaratnam

S. Rajaratnam was born in 1915 in Jaffna, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka)
and was raised in Seremban, Malaysia, where his father rose from being a supervisor
of rubber estates to a plantation owner. He attended the Convent of the Holy
Infant Jesus for six months and was transferred to St Paul's, a boys' school.
He continued his education at the V.I. and then at Raffles Institution, Singapore.
In 1937, He went to King's College, London, to pursue a law degree.

Cut off from Malaya during the Second World War, Rajaratnam
turned to journalism to earn a living, never returning to university to complete
his degree. This was the time of his short stories which he would scribble
while seated together with his Hungarian-born wife, Piroska, after dinner,
either talking or listening to the radio.

On his return to Singapore in 1948, he joined the Malayan
Tribune. In 1950, he was appointed Associate Editor of the Singapore Standard.
He joined The Straits Times four years later. He was the secretary of the
Malayan Indian Congress and a founder member of the Singapore Union of Journalists.

A chance meeting with Lee Kuan Yew nudged his career path into
politics. Rajaratnam became a founding member of the People's Action Party,
and was one of the original PAP Big Three together with Lee Kuan Yew and Dr Goh
Keng Swee. In 1959, he resigned from The Straits Times to run for a Legislative Assembly
seat. S. Rajaratnam is recognised and recognises himself as the theoretician
and ideologue of the People's Action Party. In his own words, "the ideas man,"
"a public relations man… who projects the PAP image."

In the Singapore Cabinet, Rajaratnam served as Minister for
Culture (1959), Minister for Foreign Affairs (1965), Minister of Labour (1968-71)
and second Deputy Prime Minister (1973). He was appointed Senior Minister
in 1988 after he retired from active politics. He passed away in February 2006.

FAMINE

After the drought came the famine, so that it was like
walking out of one nightmare into another still more fearful. In the rice-fields,
where the harvest should have rustled, heavy and golden, was only the half-burnt
stubble of their crops. The farmers stared at the dust and ruin in their fields,
and searched one another's faces for an answer, their eyes becoming deep and
dull as the days passed by. At night, when the hungry children whimpered
in their sleep, a hopeless anger would seize their hearts. Sometimes the
wail of a woman would rise above the whimperings and groanings, and they
would know that Death, which had stalked noiselessly among them, had found
another victim; but after a while they forgot even to shudder at Death.

This obscure village was so remote, and the famine
universal, that there was no possibility of any immediate relief. They
had to survive as best as they could till help came. When their stock had
dwindled away they scoured the country for food, eating any kind of birds,
roots and animals they could find. Soon even these grew scarcer. Only the
vultures wheeled high above the sky and scanned the earth and flapped their
wings, while down below rats grew fat and sleek.

As always, a calamity brought the villagers nearer to
one another. They sought food together and saw to it that the misery of
one was the concern of all.

When the earth failed to provide them with the food
they needed, the villagers, good Hindus though they were, slaughtered
their cattle. The very thought had nauseated them.
They had looked uncomfortably at one another as they
contemplated this act of sacrilege, but hunger was an uncompromising tyrant.

After a while when they had slaughtered all their
cattle they were hungry again.

"My little son kept crying the whole night and I had
to slap him hard .. ."

"Perhaps the relief train ... I dreamt it last night.
There was so much to eat. Bags and bags of rice there were."

"Fool's dream!" cried an old woman with wild eyes,
"I too dreamed. But there were dead men everywhere and God came and
talked to me about death. Wretches! He is punishing you for your wickedness.
There is no hope. I know God . .."

"Shut up, you old hag. You will frighten the children
with your wild talk."

The village priest motioned to be heard, the well-fed
sleekness having long gone out of him.

"There is no food," he said, "except what the mercy of
brother Murugasu can give us. Yesterday evening I saw him drive his bull
to the shed. If we could persuade him then we will have food for a few days."

Farmer Murugasu lived half a mile away, isolated from
the rest because he was both rich and unfriendly by nature. There had been
much ill-will between him and the village. He was a dark, muscular creature,
whose strength made him an object of fear and hatred. He kept very much to
himself, working his field with as little help as possible, and at the
toddy-shop he would gaze gloomily into his toddy mug oblivious of the
shouts and laughter around him. Ever since his mother had died people
had hoped that he would marry a woman who would bring some friendliness
into his heart, but he had not so much as even nodded at the village
matchmaker. When the famine came he had stood aloof from the others, and
had not participated in the organised search for food.

The priest had to argue with the villagers before
they agreed to go with him to plead with Murugasu.

"Would it not be simpler," suggested someone, "if we
just went and stole it without asking him?"

"It's better that we should ask him first," said the
priest. "He cannot refuse."

"Why not?" objected the other. "We know him only
too well."

"Anyway we shall ask him first," said the priest
firmly. "Besides he locks his bull away in the shed
every night."

Murugasu was busy at his bullock-cart when the
villagers came to see him. He lifted his face, with its protruding yellow
eyes, and regarded them silently for a moment. Then he returned to his
work chopping at a log of wood with a heavy axe. A few yards away the
bull lay under a withered lime-tree.

The priest coughed and walked slowly towards the broad
shiny back of Murugasu.

"Brother," he said, "you haven't asked us why we
have come."

The axe flashed in the sun, but Murugasu said
nothing.

"We have come to ask your help," said the priest,
"the women and children are hungry."

Murugasu stopped hacking at the wood and faced
the priest.

"What has that got to do with me?" he said gruffly.
"I have none to give."

"You have a bull, brother . . ." said the priest.

"And look how fat he is!" called out someone.

Murugasu faced the crowd, his eyes glinting like
a blade flashed in the sun.

"So I have. And what of it, eh?"

An angry murmur rose from the crowd. The priest
bade them to be quiet.

"Can't you forget your hate just now, brother,"
said the priest soothingly, "the people are hungry. These are times
when we should help one another."

"Ho! Ho!" said Murugasu, mockingly, "that's funny.
So even a priest is hungry enough to sin in the face of God. A Brahmin
priest inciting these people to eat the flesh of a sacred animal!"

The priest flinched under this taunt, but with all
the quietness and dignity he could summon he answered :

"These are difficult times, brother. What matters
is not whether one eats horse-flesh or beef, but whether one lives.
Even a Brahmin is human enough to fear death."

"Die then!" said Murugasu angrily. "Better that
than be reduced to the level of pariah dogs. I've seen how you stained
the earth with the blood of sacred animals and ate their flesh without
shame. Anyway I shall not be a party to such a sacrilege. As long as
I have strength left in my hands neither you nor your starving children
are going to kill my bull for food. I shall not become a pariah dog to
please you all. At least I have the courage still to be a good Hindu."

"Your hate, brother . . ."

"Yes," said Murugasu, "I hate you all much as you
hate me even now. Only much more than hate, I have contempt for you all,
first because you want to eat the flesh of a sacred animal and secondly
because you come cringing for my help."

Angry murmurs rose from the crowd and Murugasu
gripped tight the handle of his axe. The priest, fearing that violence
might result, begged of the crowd to keep calm.

Murugasu returned to his work and, after a while,
the villagers left him. Murugasu spat on the ground and rubbed his hungry
belly.

A few days later the priest led the people in the
direction of Murugasu's farm. The pinched, haggard faces of the men
were quiet and determined this time. The nightmare of the last few
days, when death had moved among them more frequently, had become
intolerable. It had become a matter of counting one's life by the hour
and listening to the rumours of approaching aid.

The crowd, among whom were women and children,
advanced slowly through Murugasu's gate. Lean ribbed, hungry eyed,
they looked like some fearful procession of the dead. Silent, except
for the crunch of the loose soil beneath their feet.

Murugasu was squatting by the door of the shed,
and he lifted his head as the crowd stopped in front of him. He
had changed completely within the last few days. The body was
still broad and muscular, but it did not radiate the strength
which they had always feared. His eyes moved lifelessly in their
strangely hollow sockets, whilst his hair was almost grey.

The priest hesitated a moment before he spoke.

"We have come for your bull, brother. We mean
to have it this time."

"Bull? What bull?" said Murugasu. as if to himself,
and his forehead puckering as though he wished to remember things.
"Ah, the bull? Of course the bull. It's in the shed."

"Then we must kill it and share it among
ourselves," said the priest. Murugasu's restless eyes steadied
themselves as he stared at the priest.

A dribble of saliva escaped his mouth and
trickled slowly down. Half a dozen men stood around him and stared.

"But you must, brother," said the priest. "There
is nothing else to eat and the people are desperate and hungry. Have
you no heart ?"

"That I have," said Murugasu, looking at a boy,
"but the bull is a sacred animal."

“Mind you, brother," said the priest angrily,
"we intend to have your bull even if we have to use force. If you
don't give us the key we shall break open the door."

He held out his hand for the keys. Murugasu
stood up and pressed his back against the door.

"I won't let you eat my bull. Keep back! I'll . . ."

He lashed out with his fist and the men struggled
with him and in a little while had him pinned to the ground. He screamed
and struggled, and then became quiet all of a sudden as he heard
them break open the door of the shed.

The doors were flung open and the crowd moved
eagerly forward.

Then they stood still and stared at what
they saw.

The bull lay half buried in the straw, its
body stiff and bloated. Here and there were red weals where the
rats had nibbled.

The crowd held their breath and stared. One of
them moved forward and touched the glassy eyes of the bull. He drew
back startled, as a dark swarm of flies rose in a buzzing, angry
cloud.

THE LOCUSTS

One night there is a dull roar in the heavens
as of a demon seized with an agonising gripe. There is a rumble to
the east, which moves slowly to the low-lying wooded hills to the
west, screaming its fury as it passes over the huts and houses huddled
in the darkness below. The trees bend and lift their shivering
branches upwards, their leaves hissing and their roots struggling
to hold on to the soil. Flashes of lightning dart like swallows in
the sky.

Until now the village had feared a drought. The
men had scanned the sky and seen only wisps of cloud wandering like
lost souls. The countryside had been browned and blistered; the
mango-blossoms, which flowered like stars, had withered. Because
of this dread in their hearts people had quarreled over trifles.
Nadasen, the potter, had so beaten his wife that she had run
screaming to take refuge in her mother's house. Subbrayan, the
barber, armed with a razor, had laid seige to Kumarapa's house,
because the latter's wife had squirted pan juice into his pumpkin patch.

Now that the rain has come a new mood comes
over the village. Nadasen's wife is running in the rain back to
her husband. She laughs. Subbrayan folds his razor and says with
a sigh, "Ah, what's the use of slitting the rogue's throat now.
The rain will wash away the pan juice from my pumpkins."

In his shop Thulasi sits and listens to
the rain and smiles. Yes, yes, everything will be different
in the village now. There will be work to do tomorrow. The
fierce patter above reminds him of a leak in his thatched roof.
"Ay, woman!" he calls out to his wife, "a bucket, quick! No.
No. The biggest one you can find." He limps away with the bucket,
for one of his legs is crippled. He returns, lies down on his
straw mat, and thinks that it was about time he had his roof thatched.

The drip, drip, drip, drip of the rain into the
bucket soon puts him to sleep.

The next morning Thulasi wakes up to find his
wife complaining that the bucket has overflowed and made a mess of
the dung floor. Outside he finds that the sun is already out, and
has given the wet leaves and grass a rich sparkle. The air is full
of the exciting smells of the flowers and the earth. Even his crippled
foot feels a strange tremor.

The womenfolk are already washing at the well;
the children jumping into puddles and screaming their lungs out.
Annamal, the milkmaid, passes by with an earthen vessel balanced
on her head. She holds herself erect and plants each foot slowly
but firmly forward. The graceful swing of her broad hips makes
him wish he were young again.

"Ah, my sweet Annamal," he says with mock gallantry,
"how beautiful you have grown this morning! Will not the wedding drums
beat for you this season? Even Uncle Thulasi's heart has succumbed
to your charms."

Annamal is so seized with embarrassment
that she nearly drops her vessel of milk.

"Let me be. Uncle Thulasi," she says, "I nearly
spilt my milk."

Then she walks away with the grace of a goddess,
thinking of Surian whose match-maker had already talked matters over
with her father. After the harvest the wedding drums will
throb for her.

Thulasi chuckled after her. Everything about
him was so full of new life and sounds that his heart could not
contain the ecstasy he felt.

"Where does all this happiness come from?" he
said to himself. "Yesterday and the day before and before that
there was bitterness and sorrow. Today there is so much of joy that
I want to sing and dance like that crazy cow-herd Vellaii. Yes,
where does it all come from?"

"From the heart," he told himself.

"From the richness of the earth," he said
as he neared the fields.

Before him stretched a sheet of white, scintillating
water, broken only by the dark mud-dykes which separated one field from
the other. Far away the hills were tinted blue, and overhead the clouds,
light as milk foams, tumbled and spread in the sky.

Men were already at work. The warm water came up
to their knees, and they were splattered with mud. They struggled
with the wooden ploughs as pairs of bullocks went round and round.
He saw the men, small and dark against the vast sheet of water, sky,
and shining mud, moving like so many silent, lonely souls. One man
halted his plough, looked up at the sky, and wiped the sweat wearily
off his brow. Here and there men scattered their seeds from baskets
as they struggled through the mud.

A nostalgia seized him. Ah, if he only had land of his own to
plough, and sow, and reap! Once he had worked on his father's land, but his father
had to sell it to pay his debts. With the little that was left over of the money,
Thulasi's father had opened the shop which, after his father's death, he now ran.
In his shop he sold dal and salt; ghee and oil. He even had tinned stuffs which
had come from far-off lands, but, since not very many of the farmers could afford
to buy them, he kept them as decoration, taking care to blow the dust off them.
Some of the tinned food had even gone bad. Once the washerman's wife had bought
a tin of fruit for her son and complained that the boy had convulsions.

He sold clothes too, most of them cheap
foreign materials which the farmers bought. The native kadhar
was too expensive for the villagers, but he was proud of his kadhar
stock which, too, collected dust with his tinned goods.

"Expensive?" he said. "But think of it, brother!
It's real kadhar. Made in our own country, in our own mills, by our
own people. You wait, brother, and see if one day the Europeans will
not buy their clothes from us."

But now as he looked at the fields and smelt
the earth he could not forget that he was still a farmer.

"The earth is rich, and when men sweat it will
pour its riches into their laps," he said, as he walked back to his
shop, already crowded with women who were sure that the harvest would
be good this year.

Within a few weeks there was a splendid harvest.
The whole countryside was ablaze with yellow streaks of fire. When
the wind ruffled the cornfields there was a pleasant hum in the air.

"Ay Nassapa!" called out Thulasi one morning.
"I hear you are harvesting today."

"Yes. Can you not hear them? They are singing already."

"It will be hard work, eh?"

"Hard and very hot," said Nessapa, one of the best reapers.

When Thulasi limped towards the fields he heard the
children, caught in a wild impulse, run shrieking through the yellow mass of corn.

Knives and scythes flashed in the sun.

"Oh, hum, hum," breathed the men. Everyone was astir.
"O, hum, hum."

The corn-stalks fell. The women followed and tied
them up in sheaves. Behind them the ground was a brown stubble. The
hours passed.

Thulasi heard someone shout. Men collected together,
and there was a loud commotion.

"Oi, brothers," he called out as he limped towards
the men. "What is it? Has the sky fallen down?"

The men did not laugh. One of the men held a large, reddish insect
between his fingers. It was evil looking, with sharp greedy mouth,
and furry legs. It struggled, kicking its legs, and moving its hungry
jaws. Overhead the birds were already after the few of the stray locusts
that flew about. Far away over the hills was a dark, apparently unmoving
haze.

"So!" he thought. "Was all the toil for this?"

He was thinking of the acres and acres of unreaped
fields. He looked at the drawn, tired faces of the men, helpless before
the merciless invader, and a vast aching filled his heart.

The man crushed the red insect between his fingers
and threw it away. The men set to work feverishly to save what little
of the crops they could.

The dark haze over the hill grew and spread. There
was no more singing in the fields.

By next afternoon there was a drone. Louder and louder.
Women began to wail. Old men muttered prayers between their long, white
beards. The reapers stared silently at the vast tracks of ungathered corn.

"What shall we do? What shall we do?" cried the women.

"We shall starve. Who will feed the little ones?"

"Mercy, O God! Mercy! Mercy for Your wearied children."

There was mercy. For the locusts cast their shadow
over the fields and passed without alighting on their crops. When the
drone had died away the people whooped with joy.

Thulasi laughed and laughed till the tears ran
down his cheeks. It was as if his own crops had been saved. He was happy,
happy for his comrades. Now there would be plenty for the hungry, wearied
people.

"God has been merciful," he said as he walked back
to his shop. "The earth has been merciful. Yes, even the locusts have
been merciful."

He was so happy he did not hear Naga
Mudaliar call out to him.

"O forgive me, Mudaliar," he apologised, "I was
so engrossed I did not hear you. The locusts might have ruined these
poor people."

"The locusts might have ruined me, too," said Naga
Mudaliar, who owned most of the lands in the village, and was greedy for
yet more. "Shiva be praised for that! Otherwise these rogues would have
cheated me out of my dues….. What is the matter with you? There is a
strange look on your face."

The happiness went out of Thulasi's heart. He was
suddenly thinking of Sangran, the moneylender, and of the tax-collector,
of the Brahmin priest. . .

"Nothing, Mudaliar," said Thulasi. "I was thinking
of one of the locusts a farmer crushed between his fingers yesterday.
He crushed it and threw it away."

"What are you talking about?"

"Forgive me, Mudaliar. I was just wondering."

WHAT HAS TO BE

She entered through the yawning mouth of the hut
and stood wiping her hands on her cotton skirt, regarding first the
flickering oil-lamp which stood in a smoke-blackened niche in the dung
wall, and then her husband. He sat on the floor, his face buried
between his hunched-up knees and his broad, smooth back against the
battered, heavy wooden chest. There was a smell of sweat, smoke, and
soiled linen.

She stood there saying nothing, but watching her
husband who was apparently unaware of her presence. He seemed like
a man in a deep sleep. Then she moved towards the far
end of the hut and, unrolling the mat, prepared the bed.

Her face was bloodless, the skin transparent, and
her movements had a wearied, lifeless quality about them. Her hands,
especially, were so thin that they looked like dry twigs. Only in her
black sombre eyes was there a suggestion of that other strength which
came from within.

She lay upon the mat without undressing, but could
not sleep. Her eyes were fixed on her husband, who still sat there
quiet, and hugging his knees.

"Husband!" she whispered, "are you asleep?"

She had to call out a few times before he raised
his head. He looked about him dazed, as if he had not completely
recovered a grip on his surroundings. Even in the half shadow she
could see the dull, glazed film over his eyes.

"Umm!" he mumbled, looking about him.

"The bed is ready."

He rubbed his face. It was a lean, young face,
neither stupid nor intelligent, nor particularly brutal. The hands
were strong and square, with the nails black and broken.

"It's very late," she said.

"Is it, Leela?" he mumbled, without looking
at her. "Don't wait up for me, please. You go to sleep. I'll come
in later."

"But you were asleep when I called out to
you. Why don't you come to bed now instead of sitting there?
You look tired."

"I'm not sleepy really. I'll sit up for a while.
You put out the light and go to sleep, Leela."

Leela sat up and pushed back the coarse,
red blankets.

"What is it, my husband? What is ailing you?"

"It's nothing," he said wearily. "There is
nothing the matter with me. I don't feel like sleep at the moment,
that's all." He smiled feebly to reassure her.

"But there is something the matter," she cried,
moving towards him. "I know that you are worried about something.
You have been sitting like this the whole evening, and the night
before and the night before that. I can't get to sleep wondering
why! I thought it was some passing mood, but you seem to be getting
deeper and deeper into it. Won't you trust me and tell me? Please!"

She was almost in tears. She leant against him.

"But telling you won't make any difference.
Perhaps it will only make things worse. Especially now that you
are with child, it will be better if you don't know."

His arm which she gripped was without life.

“But don't you trust me enough?" she pleaded.
"Have you not told me your troubles before — troubles which were not
easy to bear? When we lost our land it was a terrible blow, but it
was easier for you when you told me - Won't you trust me and tell me now?"

He stared at her, his eyes suddenly becoming
bright and hard.

"Yes, Leela," he said slowly, his voice an even
flow. "Yes, I can trust you. . . . You remember our first baby . . ."

"It is not that baby you are worried about!"
said Leela. "Why, it was not even ten months old when it died!
But that was six months ago. You are not still grieving for the child?"

She looked at his face, wondering whether he
was telling a tale just because she had pestered him. The child
had been a sickly thing with wheezy lungs. He had not even the
strength when her cousin Meenachi, because Leela's breasts could
not feed him, had cajoled the child to take to her own breasts.
Her husband, too, had been disappointed in the shrivelled tiny
creature, but had done everything he could for his son. The child had,
however, grown worse and worse till one day it died. She never
fully understood why the merciful death of the child should have
affected her husband so much. It was some weeks before he could
forget about the child.

"Is it the child you are worrying about?" she
asked again. He sat erect and rigid, staring straight ahead at
the struggling shadows on the wall.

"You remember how happy I was when you told
me that I was going to be a father," he said, slowly.

"I was like a schoolboy expecting a promised
gift and making plans what he would do when he got it. You grew
weak and sickly carrying the baby, but I was too happy to notice
that. Even when I heard you cry in labour I was waiting impatiently
for the howls of the baby and praying, God make it a boy. A lusty,
strong boy . . . Then the midwife handed me a tiny shrivelled
thing instead, which whined like a sick dog. O Leela, how I
hated the tiny thing right from the very start! I could not
bring myself to hold it even. Holding it I felt the smell of
death which hung over it. ...

"When I thought perhaps if I took it to the
dispensary the doctor sahib could do something for it. Perhaps
it could grow strong with the doctor's medicine. You know what
the doctor sahib said? He said, 'There is no medicine to cure
this child. It was born ill.' That's what the doctor sahib said.

"You know the rest. Yes, it was a sickly baby
and grew uglier and uglier every day. When I saw the sores come
up on the poor mite's body and heard it trying to breathe, I wondered
why it was born in the first place. Every time I looked into the
mite's eyes I could see so much of pain and misery that I had
to look away. You know, Leela, sometimes I wanted to put the
child out of its misery. Many times I had my fingers curled
round the tiny throat and thought that I had only to squeeze
once and all would have been over in a moment. Only I had not
the courage. But I swear, had the child lived longer I would
have killed it. I knew that every day the child lived it would
become harder for me to bear its growing misery. You don't know
what a relief it was when the poor thing died."

He paused to wipe his face with the back of
his hand. There was a film of perspiration on his forehead.

"God, forgive me that I should talk like
this," he continued. "Sometimes I wonder if I have a stone
for a heart! The day when I saw my own child dead the tears
in my eyes were of joy and thanks. I tried so hard to love
the child, but all I could give was pity. From the time it
was born till the day it died I suffered with the child."

She put her arms around his shoulders.

"My poor, poor husband," she said softly.
"Did I not know how you felt? Everything you went through I
had also gone through. If it had pleased God to give us such
a child it is not for us to question the ways of the Creator.
What has to be will be! But what good will it do to think about
the child now? It lived and it died, and no amount of brooding
will change the past. Besides this . . . this other child
which is to come soon, it will be as you want it."

She heard him grind his teeth, and the
expression on his face terrified her.

"It is not the dead child that has
tormented me these last few days," he cried. "Don't you
understand, Leela? Don't you understand why our child died?
The doctor said that it was ill before it was born."

She did not comprehend him at first, until
she saw his rigid accusing stare. Suddenly she was conscious
of the sick emaciated body of hers, and of the child struggling
to live within.

She groped her way towards the mat, aware
of a looming dread for her unborn child.

With the permission of T.Wignesan, editor of Bunga Emas: An Anthology of
Contemporary Malaysian Literature, 1930-63. London: 1964, 272pp.

[Published in the Malayan Times: Sunday Magazine, p. 2,
(Kuala Lumpur, Malaya) May 21, 1962, in the “Malayan Writers”
series edited by T.Wignesan.](Note: I wouldn’t today say the
same things in the same way as I did then of the short story writer
nor of the politician, of course!)

[S.] Rajaratnam: His Land & Rural Folk Themes

by T. Wignesan

Rajaratnam has traversed the road of the literati
that seems only half-taken. Whence, it appears, he lissomely retraced
his steps to begin all anew. But, actually, it is all a continuous process
in his make-up. All his short stories betray a tendency on his part to
play the social reformer.

He wrote almost all his stories in the ten years he
spent overseas, covering the war years between 1936 and 1946. Although
he went to England as a student [of Law at London University], he returned
to Malaya as a writer, both of newspaper articles and short stories.

While in London, he hobnobbed with some by now internationally
known writers and published his articles and stories in several Euro-American
journals and literary collections, such as: the former Asia Magazine, Life
and Letters Today, Indian Writing, Indian Short Stories, etc.

Rajaratnam is inevitably a “social” writer, just as he
is a socialist in politics, inextricably involved in the plight of his
less fortunate fellow beings. He is concerned with their day-to-day
problems, their hopeless birth, their degrading death, their inveterate
clinging to life, their search for food, water, and health, their fear of
wild life, locusts, drought, and even rain.

All his themes have a common ground: the land and its
rural folk. They are a simple overwrought, oppressed people. They are
troubled and perplexed by the cruelty of nature itself and only have
themselves to hold on to in the face of considerable odds. In the end,
we see his characters for the unutterable pawns that they are, only
occasionally seeing them move against their own fate.

The stories, “Locusts”, “Famine”, and “What Has To
Be”, are essentially tracts of socialism, indictments of the forces
at work to punish the unfortunate, the peasant, the underdog.

In the thirties, on both sides of the Atlantic,
writers were caught up in the upsurge of social realism, and it is
in this atmosphere that Rajaratnam first began writing his short
stories. We may also attribute his political and creative propensities
to the company he courted in London, namely Mulk Raj Anand, Iqbal
Singh, Louis MacNiece, Dylan Thomas, and others.

Rajaratnam relies inestimably on the fertility
of his imagination to construct the plot of his stories which
invariably are set in local colour. His work characteristically
abounds in the reminiscences of a mind dislodged from his own
environment and society.

A follower of no formal religion, and despite his
Hindu parentage, we see in his “Famine” that he is an uncompromising
iconoclast of fetish-bound religion, satirising in the same delineation
the Brahmin priest and Hindu devotee.

And no where in his stories do we witness the
mysterious manner in which the hand of fate errs or rather beguiles,
as in the “Locusts” [where] an insufferable locust is ignominiously
crushed between a farmer’s vengeful fingers, amidst curses, while
the impending gloom of a swarm of locusts, darkening the ripe,
un-harvested corn, bypasses to other fields.

Human Feelings

Yet, it is for his humanistic feelings he will be
remembered. He is no outright iconoclast. His essential sympathy and
understanding for the unfortunate, his self-identification with the
working-class -- he knows and understands them intimately and suffers
with them in their woes and hopes -- pervades the unconscious pattern
of his themes.

Where God has failed to reveal his bosom, he leaves
the strain of clutching hope, though ratiocination may fail to justify
the social disorder either of his imagination’s milieu or of his
intrinsic, synthetical experiences.

In “What Has To Be” hope lingers lovingly where
toil-torn emaciated frames of earthly begetters lie shredded in the
impinging memory of merciful death.

In the ultimate analysis, we have to recognise that he
is confronted with the problem of how best to serve his people. And this
struggle for expression will necessarily be contained in the conflict
that is waged in the mind of the socialist writer either to render able
and material service or continue to produce a literature that may or
may not take root in the intelligentsia who are willing to act and bring
about reform.

Three Feelings

Nevertheless, there are, I think, three reasons that
motivate his themes. First, his early childhood upbringing in the rubber
estates brought him into close contact with the pre-war estate labourers
who were no more than “free” slaves. Second, his association with socialist
writers in London during the thirties initially absorbed him as a writer,
and, third, his basically humanitarian attitude to life which moves him
to serve his people.

Insofar as we are concerned with his contribution to
Malayan letters in English, we must accept his place in our literary history
as the very first conscious artist of the short story.

His attempt to bring into sharp focus the handpicked
details which lead swiftly toward a seemingly, un-contrived revelation,
points somewhat back to Poe; while the sudden, surprise rounding up of
his stories and “economic” phraseology point toward O’Henry.

A singleness of aim or a single wholeness of effect is
evident in his stories which he adroitly maintains from his very first
sentence in order that the “outbringing” of his plot does not suffer.

Brand of Writing

If we are to categorise Rajaratnam, we must place him
in the contra-distinctive roles of the romanticist and naturalist, though
it would be necessary to ascertain his brand of writing from a greater
“host” of short stories which he may yet write. He is a romanticist insofar
as he believes in the abundant goodness of unspoiled humanity, and for
his humanitarian sympathy for the joys and sorrows of the common man.

On the other hand, he is a naturalist in that he peopled
his stories with poor, defenceless characters, playing an insignificant
part in the vast mechanism of the universe, without a right to distinguish
between good and evil and without a choice to determine their actions
in the inexorable pattern of destiny.